


You Crash Standing

by thought



Series: I went to space and all I got was... [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Nobody Dies, Doug is basically a human novelty Tshirt it's fine, Found Family, Gen, I went to space and all I got were these six people, POV Outsider, Post Traumatic Stress, no major spoilers beyond episode 33
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-26 07:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12053763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: In which Renée Minkowski comes back from space with, uh, souvenirs.





	You Crash Standing

**Author's Note:**

> CW for brief mention of suicidal ideation and implied canonical substance abuse, plus the aftereffects of working for Warren Kepler

Renée Minkowski comes back from the dead on a Thursday.

Dom's renting an objectively shitty flat in Geneva with the hush money Goddard Futuristic's has basically forced down his throat along with a variety of alarmingly creative threats to himself and everyone he has ever even considered caring about. He'd stayed in the states for a few months after they had declared Renée KIA, but in the style of every overblown grief cliche, the reminders of their life together around every corner had become too much. He chased stories determinedly across the globe while he waited for their house to sell, falling into familiar patterns of suitcase scarcity and hotel living in an unapologetic and mostly successful attempt to avoid confronting his new reality.

"You hate Switzerland," is the first thing Renée says to him after three years.

"The alternative was Paris."

"You've always been too sentimental. Think of the baguettes your missing." She sounds choked up and he can see the tension in her jaws that means she's holding back tears, but her voice remains steady. Even. He's pretty sure his legs are going to give out on him any minute, and he can no longer feel his face.

"The only thing baguettes are good for is hitting people," he says, words familiar and automatic and it still sends a jolt of harsh pain through his chest even with Renée here and alive in front of him. He's been conditioned for grief.

Someone snorts a stifled laugh and for the first time Dom notices the people huddled a little ways down the stairs, all of them with the same numb exhaustion in their eyes and visible ribs under what he's pretty sure are six different colours of the exact same cheap T-shirt.

"Nope. Nope," says the man in the pink T-shirt who looks significantly more ill than the rest of them. "Nobody wants to hear about Mr. Plumb in the library with the baguette."

"It's... a really good story," the woman behind him says. She and the man beside her, in green and blue respectively, are laughing silently-- it's the kind of laughter that could easily turn into tears when the shock wares off, Dom recognizes it from people he's interviewed right after a traumatic event.

"There's a reason," the green-shirted man says, "that I am never going back to Italy."

"It was like a piñata," blue-shirt says, weakly, obviously trying to get herself back under control. "I couldn't think about it for months without nightmares."

Dom's not quite sure how any story that ends like that can be so hilarious, but exhaustion can do funny things to people and everyone outside his door looks like they need to sleep for a week.

"What did I tell you?" Renée demands.

Pink-shirt holds up a hand. His fingernails are weirdly translucent. "I remember, Commander. 'No one say anything, I need to channel my high school job at the pet shelter where they wanted us to lie to adopters about aggressive or destructive pets'. I'm kind of offended, but also I get it."

Renée groans, then turns back to Dom. "Hi, honey." Then, with a sweeping gesture towards the people behind her-- "Look what I brought back for us from space!"

***

"It's like those birthday parties you go to as a kid," Doug says, carefully folding himself onto Dom's tiny sofa. "You know, when it's like 2:00 AM and all you want to do is go home to your parents and your bed but instead your stuck sleeping in somebody's unfinished basement in your sleeping bag that definitely hasn't been washed since the last camping trip with a bunch of kids you stopped liking about three hours ago."

"Uhhh," says Jacobi, flatly. Renée frowns at Doug. Hilbert (Alexander? Dmitri?) puts a pillow over his head. Maxwell rolls her eyes.

"And somehow there were always crushed potato chips on your pillow," Lovelace says, smiling a bit over at Doug.

"Inevitably someone stepped on the Atari controller," Dom offers, and Renée smiles at him gratefully. Maxwell brings a hand up over her mouth.

"Shut up," Jacobi says.

"It's really cute," she whispers.

"I feel old," Lovelace says, sighing.

Renée hovers around the edges of the room until everyone's settled down, hands clasped tightly behind her back. Doug is on the couch under a pile of blankets, one arm sticking out so he can rest a hand on the bulky oversized duffle bag that he's refused to let out of his sight the whole time. Maxwell curls up in a tiny ball on the carpet, back pressed up against the duffle bag like she's guarding it. Jacobi stretches out beside her, and within thirty seconds Maxwell has commandeered part of his blanket and his shoulder as a pillow. Lovelace and Dmitri set up tidy little improvised bedrolls on opposite sides of the room from each other, folding sheets to cover the carpet before they lay down and straightening their blankets and pillows. Dmitri and Doug are the only ones who don't have a visible weapon close at hand. So that's. Terrifying, and probably very illegal.

Renée double checks the locks on the front door, nudges the curtains so they better cover the windows.

"Minkowski," Lovelace says, when she starts another circuit of the living room. "We're fine. Go the fuck to sleep."

"I knew it was a mistake giving you internet access," Renée mutters, but she goes into the bedroom. Dom follows, and leaves it up to her to close the door. She doesn't.

***

"It was... bad. Up there," Renée says, slowly, stirring the sugar at the bottom of her espresso glass. "I assume you didn't get my messages."

"No," Dom says, and the idea of Renée throwing words into the endless void of space only for them to be discarded, or worse, analyzed, tucked away in a file somewhere, leaves a dull pain in the back of his throat.

"Some of the calls I had to make-- I can do it, but things were different up there. It was very... personal."

"It sounds," he says, carefully, "like some sort of test."

"I think it was, at first," she says. "And I was so angry about that. About being used for that sort of bullshit, about my crew being used for it. But later, when things were more real-- Lovelace is angry. I'm sure you can tell, but whatever you've seen it's at least ten times worse. That's all that kept her going. And I don't get that. I can understand wanting justice, but she wants revenge. She wants to burn them to the ground and it's a side benefit that it means they won't be able to do this to anyone else. And I don't know how she can--"

"Because she's military, too?" Dom asks.

Renée nods furiously, sets her spoon down. "Exactly. We take orders. That's what you fucking sign up for. Goddard isn't any different. But then I just start to wonder if I'm not angry enough. Is there something wrong with me, that they almost did the same thing to my crew and I'm not where Lovelace is? Of course I'm angry, but there's part of me that still tells me I should have expected this, that I have no right to call them out."

"They've literally broken the law in about a hundred different ways," Dom points out. "I think you're allowed to call them out."

Renée drops her forehead into her palm. "Nope," she says. "Maxwell explained it to us. There's no law in deep space."

"That sounds... inaccurate?" Dom says, and he can already feel the rush of possibility, a familiar determination to expose the faults in the logic of cruelty sure of its dotted Is and crossed Ts.

Renée shrugs. "Talk to Lovelace. I'm not-- I can't. I got my people home safe, I need to make sure they stay that way. Lovelace didn't. Our priorities are different."

Dom watches the people on the sidewalk outside the cafe window for a couple minutes, trying to put his thoughts to words.

"You see the correlation there, I'm sure."

Renée nods slightly.

"You got your people out. She needed something else to drive her."

"Justice I understand," Renée says. "Vengeance is a little harder outside of daydreams. It's not productive."

"In her case it sounds like it might be."

"That's why I'm letting her do it."

Dom's eyebrows go up. "Letting? I'm not sure anyone could stop her."

Renée laughs under her breath. "I could. Maybe. She'll never listen to me in a professional setting, and looking back I'm starting to think that's probably pretty reasonable, she was better at the job than I was --no, let me finish-- but in a personal capacity, yeah, I could talk her out of it."

"I say again, you got your people home. She didn't."

"Circumstances were different. And I can recognize skill. Objectively, she's better at managing people and high-stress situations than I am. That's fine. I'll take being a stable and mostly mentally healthy person over being good at my job."

"I don't want to pry, but--"

"I don't think any of us got out of there without some PTSD. But Lovelace did the whole thing twice over. And she's got all of Eiffel's creativity and emotional investment paired with my work ethic and competence. It's not necessarily a personality type that lends itself to being ok." She drains the last of her coffee. "And, I mean, there's... the other thing."

Dom waits, but Renée seems content to leave it at that.

"The... other thing?:"

"Lovelace just... has a lot on her plate," Renée says. "Are you going to finish your coffee?"

"I definitely am," he says, pulling the glass closer. It's clear the conversation is over.

***

"Surprising no one, you still don't understand the magnitude of Goddard's influence, do you?" Maxwell snarls. Doug pushes himself up from where he's been leaning forward across the kitchen island. "I get it! Believe me, I get it! It's Lexcorp meets 1984 and we're persona non grata on the whole planet. But I don't for one second believe that between you and Hilbert there isn't a way to keep this under the radar."

"And you're willing to take that risk? Because I'm not, and neither, I bet, is Hera."

"Which we don't know! Because she's asleep! Because she's been asleep for six months, squished into that piece of shit Del on steroids with no contact with the outside world and no say in what happens to her! I think she's had her choices made for her enough for one lifetime, but hey, maybe that's just me."

"The only choice I'm making is to wait a few more weeks until I can get us enough servers and a safe place to store them. I'm sure Hera would just love being woken up a bit early so she could run on some rented corporate garbage for about ten seconds before Goddard noticed and wiped her."

"Oh, so *you're* making the choice now, are you? What the hell gives you the right to just step in and take over."

"Um, because I'm the only one even remotely qualified to understand the situation? Just because you have latent issues around cryo that you're projecting on to Hera it doesn't mean I'm going to let you put her in danger."

"What-- I don't have-- that has nothing to do with this! I'm just trying to give Hera a chance to be involved in what happens to her."

Maxwell braces her hands on the worktop and stares at a point just to the right of Doug's forehead. "Look. Eiffel. I'm sorry you miss your friend."

"No you're not."

"I care about Hera, too. Which is why I want her to be safe. To have the best chance of living to make those decisions for herself. She's perfectly safe where she is right now. She's not aware of time passing, it's not like the longer she stays compressed the worse she'll feel coming out of it. This isn't even a debate. It was never a debate. We're going to buy the servers and find a safe place for them and then I'll work on installing Hera and waking her up. That's it. You can either make even more of a fuss about it than you already are, or you can shut up and stop getting in my way."

So, Dom thinks. That's what's in the duffle bag.

***

Doug has nightmares.

Well, he assumes they all have nightmares, but Doug is the only one who wakes up screaming.

Once it becomes clear that Renée's entirely serious about basically adopting her whole crew for the foreseeable future, they move into a small house in a quieter area of the city. It's still not big enough, but at least nobody is sleeping on the floor, and Goddard doesn't come knocking to inquire about an unusual purchase. Everyone is convinced that Goddard will be monitoring him, especially now that Goddard definitely knows they're alive-- this always said with Hilbert and Lovelace's best glares aimed at Maxwell and Jacobi, and Doug muttering something about 'team what's wrong with handcuffs?'. When he asks, Renée just says "There were eight of us on that shuttle." Dom can count. He wonders who the eighth person was.

There are three bedrooms, but luckily one of them was set up for children, so there are two twin beds in one of the rooms. He and Renée take the room at the front of the house, and Jacobi and Maxwell take the room at the back. Doug and Lovelace each take a twin bed, and Dmitri is relegated to the sofa. No one seems particularly sympathetic.

One night when they sound particularly bad Dom creeps past Doug's room where he and Renée are sitting close together, heads bent towards each other talking softly, and pads out into the back garden. Lovelace is sitting on the step, knees tucked up against her chest with her arms wrapped around her legs. She's fiddling with an unlit cigarette, tossing it the couple inches back and forth between her hands.

"I didn't know you smoked," Dom says, and feels immediately ridiculous. He knows almost nothing about any of these people. Why state the obvious?

"I don't," she says. "Not for years. I went to space. Graduated to addictive coping mechanisms that were a little less flammable. It's kind of nice knowing I have the option again, though."

"Renée said something about the legalities of what happened up there," he says after a few minutes of vaguely awkward silence. "I've been meaning to ask if there's anything I can do. I have contacts that might be able to help. There's always a loophole."

She shoves a hand back through her hair, leaving it standing up at weird angles. "Not with Goddard. It's not what happened during the missions that I'm going to hit them with. I need to find enough evidence of the many laws they've broken here on Earth. And I have to do it without implicating Jacobi and Maxwell. Or Volodin, I guess."

"You don't sound happy about that."

"I'm not. But I don't have a choice. They know things about me that are just as dangerous."

"They were in on it, then? The three of them?"

"More than the rest of us were, that's for damn sure. My issues with Volodin are a bit more personal."

He can believe it. Dmitri is bitter and sharp-tongued, and seems to enjoy bating Lovelace. Maxwell and Jacobi, he has to admit, are rather unremarkable when compared to the others-- he hasn't really gotten to know them at all. With this new information he wonders if that was deliberate on their parts.

"I'm going to go check on Doug and Renée," he says. "Let me know if there's anything I can do. I'd like to be able to do something to help."

She glances up at him at that, a quick flash of a smile. "Yeah. I'm sure I can find something to keep you occupied."

Inside, the clock on the stove tells him it's almost 03:00. He wonders if Lovelace has slept more than an hour at a time since they got back. He looks out at her through the window, her silhouette barely illuminated in the moonlight. Renée brought her people home safe. He wonders if Lovelace knows she's one of them.

***  
Dom and Doug do the grocery shopping. Doug is more comfortable going out in public than Dmitri or Lovelace, and they've realized, a little belatedly, that Dom and Renée being seen together increases the risk of recognition and identification.

Maxwell comes back to the house every now and then with stacks of bills, hundreds and hundreds of franks that she just tosses casually on the table with no explanation. It makes subtly buying enough food to feed seven adults a lot easier. It also kind of makes Dom feel like a drug dealer when he pays at the counter, but luckily there are enough shops around that he doesn't go anywhere often enough to be recognized.

The shopping trips are also a nice chance to talk to Doug about everything that happened without accidentally stepping on one of the landmine's littered through everyone else's neuroses. Doug avoids the topics he doesn't want to talk about, and Dom doesn't push, but Doug is more willing to provide actual concrete details than anyone else has been as of yet. It settles Dom's over-active imagination, to have the facts, no matter how horrifying. He can always imagine something worse, if, admittedly, not nearly as fucking surreal.

Doug doesn't talk about his life before the mission, and Dom sees the way he walks past the beer and wine aisles in the shops fast with eyes straight ahead and he doesn't ask about that, either.

Doug is comfortable to be with in the same way that Lovelace is, just about ten times less terrifying. Dom isn't the sort of person to paper over tragedy with humour, but he's easily lulled by those who do. Doug sings along with the car radio and gets practically teary-eyed over icecream and buys novelty shirts that he presents to Renée with all the solemnity of a military awards ceremony. He answers all of the questions that Dom's inner ten-year-old has about life in space. The shopping trips feel like a moment to breathe before diving back underwater and yes, of course Dom feels guilty about it, but he thinks maybe they're the same for Doug and that's enough to keep him encouraging it.

They get back from the shops on Wednesday late in the morning and walk right into the middle of Renée and Dmitri arguing in what he's pretty sure is Ukrainian. Which makes no sense, it's at least a fourth language for both of them, and Dmitri switches to English as soon as he notices Doug and Dom in the doorway to the kitchen laden down with bags.

"If you insist," he snarls at Renée, "in keeping Kepler's favourite weapons primed and loaded in your spare bedroom, is only logical to make use of them, yes?"

"No," Renée says. "For so many reasons, I don't even know where to start. But let's go with basic human decency and finish with I don't trust them as far as I can throw them. Besides, Lovelace would be upset if we messed up her legal case. Have you seen her boxes of files? Because I think she's murdered an entire forest by now."

"And you really believe bringing them to court will work?"

"Court. The media. I have faith in Lovelace to destroy Goddard, if nothing else."

Dom's seen the boxes, and he's seen the cold fire in Lovelace's eyes on her fiftieth hour awake and still going strong. He agrees with Renée. Goddard will burn, and it's a waiting game to see if Lovelace will burn along with them.

***

Lovelace and Renée get into an argument the day after Hera comes online. Dom's in the living room helping Maxwell install cameras and speakers and mics in various areas around the room so she can communicate with everyone. Jacobi's playing a video game and losing-- deliberately, if the way Maxwell's eye keeps twitching every time his character emits a death rattle is anything to go by.

He hears the back door slam shut first, then Renée's voice raised in anger. He can't make out what she's saying, but as footsteps come closer to the living room he can hear Lovelace's low responses.

"Sounds like there's trouble in paradise," Jacobi says blandly, not looking away from the television.

Dom thinks about going in to mediate for about two seconds, then returns his focus very intently to the wires he's twisting together.

The three of them remain in an uncomfortable, anticipatory silence while the muffled argument continues. "Grow the fuck up, Minkowski," Lovelace says, louder now. "You don't need to be a genius to see it. Google a checklist, for Christ's sake."

Renée replies, this time too quiet to be understood.

"Am I seriously the only one who sees this?" Lovelace demands. "I don't even like them, but I can recognize the fucking obvious. Take ten seconds to think back on the hephaestus if you need help figuring it out."

They both get quiet after that, and a minute later the back door opens again and then closes quietly and he can't hear them at all.

"Well that sounded exciting," Jacobi says.

Maxwell shrugs. "Not really. Ok, Hera, I've connected the speakers. How's camera 7 looking?"

"I can see all of the candy wrappers on the end table," Hera says, her voice a little staticky. "Hasn't Commander Minkowski been making you eat your vegetables?"

"Ha ha," Maxwell says, shaking her head. "You're hilarious. Ok, I'm going to work on the upstairs mics next, those should be easy."

"Ok. Hi, Mr. Jacobi. Mr. Koudelka."

"Hi, Hera," Jacobi says.

"Hello," Dom says, still a little uncertain.

"It's nice to meet you." He's not sure how a computer can sound unsure, but she definitely does.

"Don't worry, Hera," Maxwell says. "He's very nice for a typo."

"I'm never speaking to you again," Hera says. Maxwell grins brightly.

The door bangs open again. "That was fast," Jacobi observes. He still hasn't looked away from the TV. Dom gets the impression he's enjoying all the awkwardness a bit too much.

Renée strides into the living room, jaw set, hands behind her back. Lovelace loiters in the doorway behind her, leaning against the doorframe.

"Jacobi," Renée says. "Maxwell."

"That's us," Jacobi says.

"I-- I think I need to talk to you both about something."

"Maybe you should wait a while until you're sure," Maxwell says, innocently. Renée clenches her teeth.

"No. Listen, this is going to be an awkward feelings conversation, so we're going to get it over with nice and quick and nobody's going to be weird."

"Too late," Jacobi says immediately.

Lovelace coughs into her sleeve. Renée flips her off behind her back.

"Look." Renée glances over at Dom and Hera's cameras, then shrugs a little helplessly. "I know there's no longer any sort of command structure here. Obviously. But we're all still sort of stuck together, and let's not pretend that we aren't all a bit fucked up after everything. I just need you both to know, if for some reason it's something that Kepler drilled into your heads-- no one-- I'm not going to lash out at you, either of you, if I'm angry. Nobody's gonna... hurt you, if you piss us off."

"Jesus," Lovelace says, resting her face against the wall.

"Uhh," says Jacobi. He's still watching the TV, absently making his character go around in circles. "It's cute that you think you could do anything to us that we didn't like, I guess?"

"Believe in yourself, Minkowski," Maxwell adds, not even trying to hide her amusement. "Good talk, but neither of us have been those sort of people since we were ten years old."

Dom winces. He really should not be hearing this. Lovelace actually scoffs. Dom frowns at her.

"Just because you do fucking terrible things to other people doesn't mean someone can't do the same to you," Lovelace says.

"Unlike the rest of you idiots, we're adults who were fully aware of what we were signing up for," Maxwell says cooly.

"Uhhhh," Hera says, uncertainly. Lovelace opens her mouth, hand coming up like she's ready to engage in some very enthusiastic hand talking.

"Leave it," Minkowski says, sharply. "I've done it, Isabel. We agreed you wouldn't push it."

Lovelace throws up her hands. "Fine. Whatever."

"Are you twelve?" Renée hisses.

Lovelace leaves, but she throws a contemplative look at Jacobi and Maxwell where they've cheerfully gone back to ignoring everyone else but Hera.

***

Maxwell and Renée have developed an unspoken alliance. Dom doesn't think anyone else has noticed, but time zones mean he's often awake at odd hours on Skype with his editor or carying out interviews, and he's never been great at keeping a regular sleep schedule anyway. Lovelace is usually up, too, but she tends to take her laptop outside to work on her preparations for the legal takedown. Dom helps her, sometimes, but she's almost obsessively possessive of the project.

It does mean that he hears Doug's nightmares. Or, rather, he hears Hera waking Doug up before the nightmares can really take hold. Hear's her talking him through the fog of unconsciousness, date, location, safety. Doug talks to Hera almost constantly throughout the day, but the conversations Dom passes by at night are quieter. More serious. In the mornings Doug stares blankly over his giant mug of coffee and the dark circles under his eyes get heavier and heavier with each day.

Renée sleeps through the night, now, but the concern she tries to mask around Doug looks just as tiring.

Hera is still strange to Dom-- strange more so for her human qualities than any lack. She gets offended, flattered, frustrated. And yet he can not process how such a thing is even possible, which makes him wonder at the artificiality of coded emotion, which inevitably leads into deconstruction of biological emotion and the question of what makes an emotional response legitimate when everything, biological or artificial, can be broken down into cause and reaction. His goddamn Philosophy minor is coming back to haunt him eighteen years late.

They're all sitting down to the semi-weekly family dinner (instituted when Renée had had a very small rage-induced breakdown and ranted about how she and Dmitri are the only two people who are both capable of making decent food and also of remembering to eat it regularly) the first time he witnesses Hera having a panic attack. Lovelace makes an offhand comment about something Hera had been helping her with earlier in the day, which somehow spirals into Hera worrying about a decrease in her processing speed after being installed on the servers they had purchased for her. Doug starts talking immediately, a litany of distracting banter and affectionate reassurance even as he drops his fork and stands up to head into the living room for more privacy.

"There's actually an explanation for--" Maxwell starts, but Doug waves her off and Hera doesn't even seem to register that she's spoken.

It takes a few months of Hera waking Doug up from nightmares and letting him talk at her until morning, and Doug talking Hera through her anxieties with distraction and vague reassurances before Maxwell and Renée seem to realize they've both been replaced in their roles as... comforter? Dom doesn't even know what to call it. What every single one of them needs is about ten years of really excellent therapy, but circumstances being what they are they're having to make do by trying to bandage each other up with whatever extra resources they can spare on any given day. And he has the feeling Doug and Hera are trying to heal wounds that are too similar, gaps that hold shapes neither of them have the pieces to fill. At the same time, their friendship (or whatever it is, he's really not sure how that works with an AI) is the healthiest relationship any of the survivors have besides he and Renée. Maxwell and Jacobi are unapologetically interdependent to a frankly incredible extent, Doug and Dmitri go from hating each other to awkward attempts at kindness and back again practically hourly, and Renée and Lovelace are stumbling backwards and uncoordinated into what will probably wind up being a sickeningly adorable relationship once they get there, but which is currently mostly made up of missteps and sharp edges.

In the end, it doesn't matter what Renée thinks, or what Maxwell thinks, and it sure as hell doesn't matter what Dom thinks. Doug and Hera are determined to take care of each other, and no one's going to try to justify standing in the way of that.

***

Dom's sitting on his and Renée's bed, sorting through a thick stack of tax returns from one of Goddard's subsidiaries when Lovelace comes in. She's still got a bit of flour on her cheek from where she'd been strongarmed into helping Renée and Dmitri with Perogypocalypse 2017.

"Cats," she announces, throwing herself down across the foot of the bed.

"Say again?"

"They're like fucking cats. Maxwell and Jacobi."

"You mean how they still think sneaking up on people and scaring ten years off our lives is the height of hilarity?"

"Not what I was referring to, but still accurate. Did you ever have a cat?"

"no. My grandfather was allergic, then Renée and I always wound up renting in places where they didn't allow pets."

"Well. A thing about cats. When they're sick or injured, they don't let you know. That would be too goddamn logical. Instead, they run off and find the darkest, most inconvenient hiding place they can squish themselves into and hope they either get better or die before you find them."

"This doesn't sound like it's going anywhere good."

"Jacobi fucked up his wrist," she says, irritably. "And he was freaking the fuck out about it because his hands are kind of, you know, important to his work. So naturally, and please, stop me when this starts to sound too fucking stupid to handle, he decided he'd attempt to pop all the bones back into their proper place himself and then stay in his room until the swelling went down. For four days. And his backup plan was to break into a lab where Maxwell could make him a robot hand. Because sure. Of course. Why not?"

"I mean, I can't imagine hospitals would be the safest place for any of you."

"We do have contingency plans if that becomes necessary, but that's not the point. The point is, he was hurt and neither he or Maxwell felt like it was safe to let any of us know about it. And contrary to mounting evidence, they are both fully functional professional adults who should know better than to pull this sort of shit. And don't even start me on how he managed to hurt himself--"

"You have to tell me now, you can't just leave it at that."

"They go running. Every day. They literally go running until one of them physically collapses. It's a competition! They're having a great time! Jacobi's legs gave out and he landed on his wrist on a concrete curb, because neither of these assholes has ever learned how to handle boredom. Or emotions. Incidentally we all managed to remain entirely unaware of the three week discussion they had on the pros and cons of joint suicide. Just in case you were starting to feel like a decent human being."

Dom swallows. "I assume they decided the cons won?"

"They've tabled the discussion until the dust settles with the Goddard case," she says, flatly. "God, I miss the days when I thought Kepler and Goddard in general had left them with nice simple triggers like not wanting to be touched or avoiding eye contact."

"Those do sound like reasonable abuse responses," he offers. Lovelace rolls over, draping her arms over her face and crinkling papers under her back.

"Not in their case, apparently. That's not even related, to the abuse, and I'm kind of a jackass for assuming. Side note, we aren't using the a word, everybody here is just fine and has never been influenced by another person in their lives ever."

Dom pokes her in the ribs until she lifts up and he can rescue the papers. "It's good that they're opening up to you. You're good with them. Which... was not intended to come out as condescending as it did, they aren't children."

"I'd really, really rather not talk about why they react better to me," Lovelace says, all of her anger deflating in a rush. "Ugh, is this all the tax shit?"

"Yep."

She sits up, runs her hands back through her hair. "Ok. Ok. Where are you at?"

An hour later, Renée comes in already in her pyjamas, and kicks them both off the bed so she can go to sleep. Three hours after that, she sits up, blurry with sleep, and glares down at them.

"It's sleeping time now," she says, firm and unquestionable like she's giving an order. There are pillow creases across her cheek.

Lovelace pushes herself to her feet, and makes a face when her back and legs crackle audibly. "I'll finish this up downstairs," she says.

Renée glares. "Sleeping time, Isabel. It's three in the goddamn morning. Both of you come to bed or I swear I'm filling your MP3 players with Broadway hits."

Lovelace's eyebrows shoot up. Dom sighs. Dom feels a bit like Renée's just casually twisted a radio dial on a station he hadn't even noticed was fuzzy.

"We'll talk about this in the morning, since it's apparently such a surprise for both of you idiots," Renée says. "But right now is not the morning. Now come to bed."

Dom closes his laptop and stacks the papers on top. Lovelace tosses her hoodie on the back of a chair. Renée settles back down on the far side of the bed, clearly pleased with their responsiveness and Dom realizes that Renée has never stopped bringing her people home safe.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry did you expect anybody to deal with their experiences in a healthy way?  
> I might continue this with scenes from other POVs because a lot was going on that Dom was unaware of.  
> Come cry with me on tumblr, I'm [Thought-](http://thought-.tumblr.com)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [five flucloxacillin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12197679) by [torrentialTriages](https://archiveofourown.org/users/torrentialTriages/pseuds/torrentialTriages)
  * [I'll be next to you when it all fall through](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12432504) by [frith_in_thorns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns/pseuds/frith_in_thorns)




End file.
